NYC Sketches, Summer Plans, and Film Festival News

NYC was a blast! My first time and possibly my shortest vacation ever (I was only there for 2.5 days) but it was enough to conjure up these sketches below. (The first one however is from May, drawn at the Pasadena Huntington Gardens, but I thought it’d fit the series here.)

To start of the trip, I drew some clouds in the plane, and thought a lot about ideas for my story “Dandelions.” Think of it as concept art for it, if you may.

And then, New York City…

The New York experience wasn’t even barely the tip of the iceberg, but it was still well worth doing. I stayed mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn and traveled alone this time, and while it gives one a lot of freedom, it can sometimes be rather isolating. First of I gotta thank Lisa King of KidsFilmFest for not only selecting my film to be part of the festival this year, but also for putting me on a nice hotel for 2 nights. Thank you Lisa! Also, everyone that I met was awesome, here’s a quick list: Lisa King, Tomoko Oguchi, Ru Kuwahata, and Annie Poon. Their films are cool and so are they.

What else… oh yeah, the 3600 year old Egyptian relic at Central Park!?! No one ever told me about that, but there it was, Cleopatra’s Needle. I was in awe, and hopefully the sketch shows some of that as well.

Unfortunately, I was too busy being social to sketch people at the festival, but I did get some interesting figures at the Guggenheim. Oh man, Guggenheim! There was a huge Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit there that totally blew my mind. Now I understand why Frank Lloyd Wright is, well, Frank Lloyd Wright.

And who can ignore the Guggenheim’s own collection of precious paintings by the masters! I saw paintings by Picasso, Kandinsky, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Vuillard, among others I can’t remember now.

In other news, my film “Her Lion’s Jump” got into Comic Con! And it will screen there twice!! Read all about it here http://herlionsjump.wordpress.com/. So if you miss it the first time, you can see it the second, or both times! However I will only attend the first screening because on Saturday, July 25th, I’m going up north to Berkeley to see perhaps one of the most influential animation artists in the world, and the most influential artist on my art and career, Hayao Miyazaki. Now now, I know he’ll be at Comic Con and in LA following that, but I these nice numbered tickets and I’d rather see him without worrying about crowds, know what I mean? Besides, my folks live in the Bay Area, so it’s always good to stop and say hi, eat some home cooking… you know what that feels like.

Besides all that craziness, I also took a quick trip to Yosemite, which was awesome, but I think my fiancée did a better job at describing that here on her Yosemite set Flickr page than I ever could.

I plan to get back to “Hockey, Love, and GUTS!!” as soon as I get back to normal, even though normal still means unemployed, but hopefully something will pop up soon that will change that.